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May 27, 2012

Growing up in Austria, there were two vegetables that were grown all around me, but that nobody seemed to eat: pumpkin and sweetcorn. My grandparents owned and worked a small farm, which was more a labour of love with my granddad combining the functions of cobbler, designated medicine-man and mayor of the little town my parents grew up in. But grow vegetables they did - and for sweetcorn and pumpkin he just had one thing to say: pumpkin was for the pigs and sweetcorn for the chicken. We never ate any of it ourselves.

The only experiences of eating sweetcorn as a kid was going to a lake near my hometown in the summer and stealing baby sweetcorn from the field behind the parking lot. Eating it there and then, with an adequate portion of guilt gnawing on us while we were gnawing on the cob. And, well, there was popcorn on those long game nights our family used to cherish. Homemade, in the pot, with luscious amounts of butter, because my parents never owned a microwave. And because we love our butter. But that's a whole different story.

So I only came to appreciate fresh sweetcorn when living in London and enjoying BBQs in our own garden. We always had corn on the cob there, with generous amounts of chilli and herb butter. And if there were leftovers, I would make sweetcorn soup or salad the next day.

This recipe uses fresh sweetcorn, as we don't have a BBQ here - but feel free to substitute leftover grilled corn or even try canned if maize is not in season in your neck of the woods... just adjust the cooking time accordingly. And because no soup is complete without a topping, be it garlic croutons or a generous sprinkle of parmesan, I added some crunchy popcorn and crispy bacon... a match made in heaven. I made enough of the topping to be nibbling away on it for the rest of the evening - it's unbelievably moreish, don't say I didn't warn you!

Oct 04, 2011

Not usually into "weird" foods, I do realise marrow bones are not necessarily a staple item in modern-day kitchens. Although I'd easily run a mile to avoid anything with offal, I have always liked marrow bone on the rare occasions that presented themselves. I reality, I only know them as part of the traditional Viennese Tafelspitz where it is cooked for various hours together with the meat and the soup served as its starter, and the marrow is spread thinly on toasted rye-bread as a special treat in between courses. Or cut lengthways, simply put under the grill for a few minutes until it bubbles, and enjoyed with sourdough bread and a tangy herb sauce.

When I got Peter Gordon's "Fusion" to review a couple of years ago, I was immediately intrigued by his recipe. It is rich, but full of flavours, and definitely out of the ordinary. Depending on which bone or which part of the bone you happen to be buying, you might have more filling than you can fit in the bone... serve the surplus alongside in a little bowl, you will find there won't be any left-overs!Keep the bones you have so pain-stakingly cleaned for the next time - you can even put them in the dishwasher, leave them to dry thoroughly and store in a dry place - just like scallop shells, you can use them for years to come!

Feb 20, 2011

The rainy season is officially over, which means two things... we no longer have to put on our "winter" clothes to go out in the evening (you wouldn't believe how cold 25C can feel after 6 months of living in a tropical climate!) and we get to enjoy BBQs again on a regular basis. Of course, our way of living here is completely different from back in London - which has its up- and its downsides. On the downside, we no longer can step outside into our own garden to fire up the Weber when we feel like a big juicy steak, as BBQs are not allowed on a condo balcony. But what we lose in spontaneity, we gain in company...

Booking one of the BBQ pits in our condo is such a palaver (filling in a form well in advance, incl. out your FIN number, paying a deposit, etc) that it's worth making a bigger thing out of it. So there you have the upside: we never barbecue alone anymore. It's usually a late-afternoon get-together with a number of families in our block of flats, the children splashing in the pool or riding their scooters, the ladies sipping a cocktail with their feet in the Fish Spa (yes, we have our own!) and the big boys manning the Teppanyaki grill. And we don't even have to worry about cleaning up after!

To minimise the effort involved, everybody chips in with supplying booze, some dips, a selection of side dishes or a dessert - and here is what I made last time. My friend Nina said she loves couscous and is always happy to get new ideas, so I decided on a refreshing couscous salad. You'd really be hard-pressed to find a salad that is easier to prepare - the couscous takes a bowl of stock and all but 15 minutes to soak, then your roast some chopped up vegetables in the oven, throw it all in a bowl, give it a generous glug of olive oil and lime juice and you're ready to rock and roll! If you want to spruce it up a bit, add some chopped herbs or toasted pinenuts, some olives or cubed scamorza, you could even add some left-over roast chicken if you want this to become a more substantial salad - the possibilities are endless.

Nov 24, 2010

So I might struggle to find some ingredients here, but prawns are something Singapore definitely has no shortage of and the quality is absolutely amazing! There are many seafood restaurants in town and for someone coming from a country/continent where seafood is rarely available fresh (meaning that it hasn't been frozen or transported on ice somewhere along the supply chain), this country certainly is prawn heaven. No matter where you go, you can be sure to be served the plumpest and juiciest prawns - fingerlickingly good.

Our first experience of eating prawns here was on Boat Quay - now, to even the most seasoned, but still undiscerning tourist, this might look like the tourist trap par excellence... in the middle of the Financial District and close to all the sights, a row of restaurants lined up along the river, right where the cruises depart. If it wasn't for two little boys (and the two adults lugging them around and cheering them on "come on, it's only 35C in the shade!") who happened to be utterly exhausted after what really was just a short walk, it wouldn't even have crossed our minds to enter one of the eateries there on the river. Where we come from, big, fat panels of glossy photos of, well, food (but not the kind of foodporn you find on blogs these days, just poorly photographed dishes of unidentifiable food objects) don't really scream "die, die, must try" or even "decent food at reasonable prices" at you... they holler "get out of here as fast as you can, this is a complete rip-off and you'll probably be hugging the toilet for days".

Not so here. After passing by the 15th restaurant and its seafront garden and fending off many a smooth-talking waiter, I let myself finally be lured into one of them (it was the "fish and chips available" that did it, you might remember that the day before, my son had said that he hated Chinese food and that was that) - and Chris and I had the most wonderful selection of top-quality prawns we had had in a very long time. The sheer variety on offer will bowl you over, but I will have to delve into the weird (cereal prawns, anyone?) and wonderful (drunken prawns, yessir!) ways of enjoying your crustaceans on another occasion.

Now that I call a (fantabulous!) kitchen my own and have a great wet market just around the corner, I obviously want to get my hand dirty and cook again... Vietnamese being one of my favourite cuisines on this continent, I finally embarked on getting my money's worth out of Lemongrass and Lime, a cookbook I bought ages ago - I had simply been struggling to find the ingredients. And what in London would have involved a car journey to the Asian supermarket and my tried and trusted fish monger, both in different parts of town, is now available right on my doorstep... you can see why I am loving it here, right?

These prawns are deep-fried just for a minute in order to retain all their succulent juices, the crispy coating of a light batter providing a lovely contrast of textures. I love the salad they come with it, its flavours being like a summation of what Vietnamese cooking is about: fresh, crunchy ingredients bursting with flavour - sweet, sour, salty all happening in one bite in perfect unison. It actually uses the same sauce you will serve for dipping, the ubiquitous Nuoc Cham. I have made a mental note to include coriander and mint leaves when I make it again, just because I am addicted to these herbs and they feature widely in Vietnamese cooking, so I think the food police has nothing on me.

Jun 24, 2010

Ah! Samphire! Always such a treat, but so hard to track down. When you do get your hands on some, you get an extra reward by a fishmonger whose smile says "that's a girl who knows her seafood". I know he loves me for always asking for the more unusual stuff, the things that are just that bit harder to track down, and he, like me, enjoys the resulting satisfaction. I like that. A lot. So that's my Ode to the Polish (I think) chubby guy at Fishworks in Richmond... I don't even know his name. Shame on me, but that's easily remedied.

Moving on. I was desperate to find some samphire as soon as the season opened, really, slightly egged on by wanting to re-create (and much improve on) a dish one of my fellow diners recently had at the Cadogan Arms in Chelsea. The idea of scallops, samphire and butter is one that's hard to beat and I like butter as much as the next person (in fact, I am positive I like it a LOT MORE than the next person), but the specimens served at said pub were swimming in obscene amounts of butter, and it wasn't of top quality either.

So I took the opportunity to create a much lighter version at home for an eclectic tapas feast we had with some friends just before our holiday to Spain... Wiebke and Dirk, if you're reading this, it always happens to us, we seem to meet the loveliest people just before relocating somewhere else - we've been living at spitting distance for the past few years, why did it take us so long to find out that we get on like a house on fire???

Anyway, everybody fell in love with this dish - and it couldn't be simpler if you tried. So next time you go to your fishmongers', see if they have some scallops and ask for a handful of samphire as well - it's an excellent source of vitamin C and minerals and, being a diuretic and digestive aid, is currently being investigated as a possibly treatment option for obesity and thought to be beneficial for kidney complaints. Here are some tips on picking your own.

The scallops are easily cleaned and all they need is flash-frying in a pan of melted butter, tossing the blanched samphire in the cooking juices and serving the lot in the shells or on some toasted sourdough - give it a dusting of freshly grated nutmeg, if you want, which is my little secret twist... a very easy, impressive and extremely satifying starter!

Apr 03, 2010

Simple pleasures are always the most satisfying in my opinion, they might not always win beauty contests or prizes for culinary innovation, but when the taste:effort ratio is as compelling as with this dish, I am most happy. I loved the creaminess of the avocado as a perfect complement to the buttery scallops - and the Asian-style dressing is a refreshing twist I should use more often... this is easily whipped together, so perfect for a weekday supper or a starter for a dinner
party.

We enjoyed this with sourdough baguette, but I was really craving another accompaniment which would have been perfect: I had it a little while ago at Zuma, where they serve an absolutely amazing tuna & salmon tartare with lotus chips and that addictive sheet of a prawn cracker with seaweed... I am still salivating at the thought of it!

Feb 18, 2010

They have but a fleeting season, yet my love for Jerusalem artichokes is very strong and probably althemore intense because of it. From November onwards I will look out for them on the market stalls and supermarket shelves and this year they arrived very late, close to Christmas only... It happens to me on regular basis that people will notice them in my trolley or at the check-out and ask what they are and what to do with them... to be honest, I think they're just as versatile as any vegetable really, do with them whatever you'd typically do with a tuber: boil and mash, make a soup, possibly a gratin like the one my friend Pille just published or a quiche... there are many ways of savouring this deliciously nutty root and I'll point you to a couple of older recipes below.

The best thing is that jerusalem artichokes don't just have a wonderfully addictive flavour, they're also incredibly good for you, containing large amounts of fruto-oligo-saccharides (or FOS to their friends) that will help maintain a healthy gut and thus strengthen your immune system... you know you could do with a little bit of that, right?

The recipe I want to introduce to you now is a simple salad. A great starter in the winter, best served lukewarm. Although our CookbookCookClub has got a bit lazy in meeting up (that's not entirely true, the reason is rather that two of the main pillars of our congregation have families and the other two are jet-setting individuals who can't for the life of them coordinate their holidays), we enjoyed a lovely winter gathering with the theme of comfort food. A slice of toasted sourdough topped with a wintery salad seemed a perfect way to start a dinner - it's incredibly easy to assemble, the jerusalem artichokes are simply roasted in the oven, the tomatoes go in with them for a little while as well, and the whole affair is topped with rocket salad, crumbly feta cheese and agresto. For those of you who, like us, are new to this concept, agresto is an Italian sauce/dressing made from walnuts, lemon peel and juice, garlic, chilli, anchovies parsley and olive oil. It goes incredibly well with the sunchokes because it not only complements their nutty flavour, but also cuts though the mellow sweetness of the vegetable.

Jan 15, 2010

I can't believe we're almost half-way through the first month of a new year... January, of course, is always a busy month around here - unlike other households, we're not going on a diet to keep half-hearted resolutions, on the contrary! We have so many birthdays to celebrate that we just go on indulging as if we had managed to keep our waists from expanding over the holidays! I have never been one for birthdays, I love celebrating other people's, but I normally tend to ignore my own. Ever since my youngest son, Henrik, was born three days after my birthday in 2007, my birthday has turned into a complete non-event... so much so that this year, I am rising in defiance and will celebrate not once, but at least four times: dinner with food bloggingfriends tomorrow, birthday brunch with local Mums on Friday, birthday dinner with the family (seafood extravaganza at home, yeah, in important situations like this one, I don't trust anyone else to cook my food ;-)) and a surprise dinner organised by my husband, probably a bit later in the year as he's left it till too late as usual...

Plenty of occasions to serve up some finger food then - this recipe is one that I promised to post in English eventually and here it is: a creamy, indulgent potato and blue cheese soup served in shot glasses, accompanied by crispy garlic butter toasts. The soup is wonderfully moreish and comforting on a cold winter evening, so also stands in as a perfect and quick weekday supper! You can use any blue cheese, but I tend to go for a creamy gorgonzola, if you prefer something a bit more pungent, try it with stilton or roquefort. If you want to go for something a bit less rustic and more luxurious, you could also use some truffles instead of the cheese and truffle oil for the toasts... You must, however, go out of your way to find good rye bread for the
garlic butter crisps, the wonderful aroma of caraway and honey that is
traditionally used in Austrian/German rye bread is a great complement
for this wintery soup - simple toast just wouldn't cut the mustard here!

Oct 12, 2009

Have I ever experienced love at first sight? That lightning-bolt experience that's the key ingredient to so many movies? Yes, I have, but it certainly wasn't with chickpeas.We've had several encounters, in many incarnations - and whenever it DID turn into a romance, it was a whirlwind, no holding back-type thing.

Chickpeas don't feature in the latitudes I grew up in, at least not in the 70s, 80s. I guess the very first time I came across them must have been in France, playing a supporting role in a vegetarian tagine. Although I liked the dish, I wouldn't have awarded them legumes an oscar.

It was when I moved to London that I once again broadened my culinary horizons and discovered Middle Eastern and North African food. Hummus was my first love - especially a certain tub they used to do at M&S with spicy red peppers... head over heels! Nowadays, I am addicted to Sainsbury's Morroccan hummus... again, a spicy version with whole chickpeas and red peppers - absolutely divine. I have yet to experience the same feelings for a tub of home-made, if you have any great recipes, do send them my way - I am always happy to learn new tricks.

Last week, fellow blogger Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen posted a recipe for chickpea soup - I read it on a rainy day, sitting in my unheated house with my toes turning blue from the creeping cold... and I just couldn't resist making this soup. As usual, I have completely bastardised it - I used canned chickpeas (so much quicker), I went wild on the spices (cumin, turmeric, sumac all in tbsp amounts) and I decided to make it in my Thermomix, as I feel slightly guilty for not posting enough recipes with TX instructions.

So there you have it, inspired by Kalyn: the possibly most satisfying soup I have made in a very long time. To make sure you also fall in love with it,

- use good quality sumac: the first time I came across it was at a workshop with Herbie's Spices from Australia... while I love their products for the exotic tastes they made me discover (wattle seed, bush tomato, lemon myrtle), I have since found that purchased from Arabic shops, the sumac is much more intense, pungent and refreshingly lemony than anything I have had before. The one I currently use (extensively) is from Mymouné which I picked up at Comptoir Libanais. Believe me, it's out of this world.

- don't overcook your chickpeas: they really taste so much better when the soup has a somewhat "coarse" consistency - a bit of bite, really.

- don't skimp on the extra-virgin olive oil: again, use the best quality you can find, its grassy notes add an extra complexity you wouldn't want to miss!

- accept the spices with open arms: not only do they taste great, they have health benefits noone can do without. Sumac is a free-radical scavenger and widely used for urinary complaints, cumin strengthens your respiratory and digestive system and turmeric is the number one herbal remedy to keep your cholesterol levels in check.

A tasty, warming soup that is also good for you... and if that wasn't enough, it's also ready in a good 20 minutes - what more could you possibly ask for???

Although this recipe is, in fact, borrowed at least in principle (see above), it'll be my contribution to this month's My Legume Love Affair, and before you ask, this has been authorised by the generous Jeanne of Cook Sister! who hosts this edition. If you want to participate, you can do so until the end of the month, details here.

Sep 15, 2009

If you thought foie gras was unusual to stockpile for the event of an emergency, financial or otherwise, may I remind you firstly that I am thepassionatecook and secondly that you'll get a can of tomatoes or a few wrinkly potatoes somehow from somewhere, but even if you resort to supermarket raids or robbing your neighbours of their much-coveted food possessions, you'll be hard-pressed to find any luxury food items there (unless you live round the corner from Fortnum & Mason, of course). So I say: rely on humanitarian aid for the basics and have a little something for the days when the rain turns into a thunder storm and you need something to lift your mood and transport you back to those happier days of your life.

Since we're being told left, right and centre that apparently, there's
light at the end of the tunnel and we might be seeing a swift economic
recovery soon, I have decided to part with one humble glass of preserve stashed away for a rainy day. I didn't have much choice in the matter, by the way, it was one of those nights when you are hard-pressed to find anything meaningful for your dinner in the fridge (I dare you to make something from a shrivelled aubergine, a half-empty glass of fake caviar, a jar of nutella and a bunch of petits filous) and can't be bothered to venture out into the pouring rain... and seeing that I bought this in a kilner jar rather than a tin, and it was approaching its best-by date rapidly, I didn't think twice.

So there you have it, that's my excuse. Not that I think I need one, there a million reasons why one should indulge and be merry every once in a while. With a bottle of sticky given to my other half as a present, this made a wonderfully decadent dinner last week, the seasonal compote of figs and peaches at their prime, a frivolous amount of crushed garlic, a glug of balsamico and some freshly picked rosemary from the garden, this was probably the best version of foie gras I have ever made. If I say so myself. And for the half hour that it lasted, I was laughing in the face of the credit crunch or whatever you choose to call it.